Readers will remember that with 2 laps to go at the last race weekend, I blew up the engine in the race car.  What a bummer.  But I’d been sitting on a spare engine that I got from a theft-recovery 328i for a year or so.  The intent for that motor was to build it up into a killer race motor, but prices were high and it was very hard to justify spending the money with the small ITR turnouts that we’ve been having.  So it sat on an engine stand in my storage unit for a long time.  Vic Sias helped me diagnose the motor with the help of my compression tester and his leakdown tester, and we determined that the #6 cylinder had no compression and it was leaking past the piston.  So, with only three weeks until the next race weekend, I decided to just put the spare engine in the car.

Read the rest of this entry »

The next race is coming up next weekend, Father’s Day weekend, at Laguna Seca.  I still think the spare junkyard engine will be up and running in the car by then, although it isn’t quite there yet.  Let’s hope.

In the meantime, the entry list is looking much better than the April Laguna race.  In that one 10 days out, there were only 189 entries on the entry list and I posted that it looked like the economy was taking its toll.  This time, summer, a double, we’re at 280 entries as of yesterday.  Sounds much healthier!

Not only that, but group 5, the IT group, is right now the largest group at 59 entries.  The Spec Miata group is 2nd at 58.  Specifically ITA is the largest class at this point, even larger than SMT (San Francisco Region’s flavor of Spec Miata).  Here’s hoping the new (used) engine helps me stay in front of all of that mess!